Sense and Sensibility (1995)

Superb historical drama adapted by Ang Lee from Jane Austen’s classic 1811 novel.

Sisters Elinor and Marianne are played wonderfully by Emma Thompson and a young Kate Winslet. Hugh Grant, Greg Wise and Alan Rickman portray the men they fall in love with. As these relationships play out, in London and Devonshire, the story examines whether we should marry for love or for status.

It's hugely involving, with moments of wit and tenderness. Hugh Grant is incredibly charming as the shy and well-meaning Edward Ferrars. Alan Rickman, for once, doesn't seem typecast or obvious. He brings real subtlety to the role of Colonel Brandon. 

As well as the main leads, there are excellent performances by Imogen Stubbs, Gemma Jones, Hugh Laurie and Robert Hardy.

One of the greatest costumers.

Finding Neverland (2004)

Intriguing (partial) biopic of the writer J.M. Barrie. 

Barrie is played unexpectedly well by Johnny Depp. Kate Winslet plays Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the widow he falls in love with and maintains a platonic relationship with, while becoming a sort of father to her children. In the meantime, he’s working on the Peter Pan play that will make his name, and which is inspired by the family he has become so attached to. 

It’s quite a touching story. “Neverland” works as a metaphor for make-believe/imagination and also for Heaven. There’s a strong performance by Julie Christie, as Sylvia’s strict and frosty mother. Dustin Hoffman is refreshingly unselfconscious as Charles Frohman, the play’s producer. 

It would be easy to criticise the film’s extremely sanitised portrayal of terminal disease, but it’s a story all about the imagination so it therefore seems to make sense that gritty realism is held at bay.

The Mountain Between Us (2017)

Disaster/survival story that’s also a romance. 

A surgeon (Idris Elba) and Guardian journalist (Kate Winslet) survive a plane crash in the High Uintas Wilderness and attempt to walk to safety. The pair are very different to each other but the intensity of the experience brings them together. 

It’s engaging and heartwarming, if a bit idealised. 

I liked the simplicity: just two people and a dog trying to stay alive in a vast, desolate space.

Jude (1996)

Michael Winterbottom’s skilful adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure is a powerful and moving saga. 

Christopher Eccleston plays Jude Fawley, the self-educated stonemason who falls in love with his well-to-do cousin Sue Bridehead (Kate Winslet). In addition to the scandal of the couple being related (and both married to someone else), the story also addresses their conflicting class backgrounds. 

There’s real gravitas in the performances and it ends up being moving without resorting to sentimentality. 

June Whitfield is excellent as Jude’s elderly mother.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

Thriller/drama directed by Alan Parker. 

David Gale (Kevin Spacey) plays a university professor and anti-capital punishment campaigner who finds himself on death row. A journalist improbably called Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet) is sent to meet him and conduct his final interviews. Through their conversations, she begins to unravel what really happened in the crime he is accused of. We see those events unfold in flashback. 

It’s a tense and exciting story that’s slightly spoiled by the last five minutes, which offers one unlikely twist too many. As soon as you start asking questions about the plot logic, it collapses. 

Spacey and Winslet are both excellent, as is Laura Linney as Gale’s friend and colleague. 

The film makes some good points about the evils of capital punishment, although you can’t help thinking that those points would be stronger still without the final twist. A simpler, more believable plot would have worked so much better.

Contagion (2011)

A pandemic thriller made fascinating by the real-world events in the era of Covid 19. 

Matt Damon’s wife (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) contracts a mysterious virus and is quickly dead. From this initial beginning spin off a variety of threads and characters as we see the virus spread around the globe, accompanied by panic and social disorder.

The narrative perspective shifts across an ensemble cast also featuring Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle and Sanaa Lathan. Director Steven Soderbergh just about holds it all together. 

Knowing what we now know, it’s almost uncanny to watch scenes in which the “R” number is explained. It also deals with the conspiracy theorists – in this case, Jude Law, who’s told “Blogging is not writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation” – who try to scare people from taking the vaccine.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

A man and woman undergo special treatment to have their painful memories of each other erased so that they can forget the suffering they endured when their relationship broke down. But, mid-procedure, the man realises he’s making a mistake and tries to hang on to what remains of his precious recollections of the person he still loves. 

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are endearing in the lead roles, and their opposites-attract romance is offbeat and believable. What spoils the film is that the visual representation of memory – much of the story takes place in Jim Carrey’s mind – seems gimmicky and over-stylised. I appreciate that they were looking for a cinematic style that could resemble the way memories appear to us, but the fast-cut visuals are so full-on and relentless that they get in the way of the story. It could have been a far stronger film if the narrative and the editing allowed for some slower scenes that gave us the space to get to know the couple better. Indeed, the rare moments when they are simply talking or enjoying being together make up the best parts of the story. 

Oddly enough, a sub-plot about the boss of the company offering memory removal (Tom Wilkinson) and a woman who works for him (Kirsten Dunst) is better handled because it unfolds at a more natural pace. 

It’s so nearly brilliant, but the execution gets in the way. It’s a shame because the idea is a great one, and it enables the film to consider all sorts of ethical and even spiritual issues about identity and how much our pasts define who we are.

Hideous Kinky (1998)

It’s 1972 and Julia (Kate Winslet) has gone to live in Morocco with her two young children. She leaves behind her old relationship and hopes to “discover herself”. She becomes involved with a kindly drifter named Bilal (Saïd Taghmaoui), who turns out to be more complicated than he seems.

Winslet is strong as the endearingly naive and earnestly questing young mother. Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan are excellent as the precocious children able to cut through their mother’s hippy-dippy aspirations and speak the truth. They are among the most impressive child actors I’ve seen.

It’s a plot that seems to unfold sideways in almost unrelated episodes, so you can never guess what will happen next. Adapted from Esther Freud’s novel, itself autobiographical, it benefits from seeming “real” because the events it depicts actually took place.

There’s an excellent soundtrack – Canned Heat, Richie Havens, Nick Drake, Incredible String Band – that brings 1972 alive. The colours are rich and vital, making it even more pleasurable to watch.

The Reader (2008)

Intriguing and moving drama. In Berlin in 1958, 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) begins a brief, passionate love affair with 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna (Kate Winslet) that will come to haunt his entire life. Fast-forwarding to 1966, Michael is now a law student who gets to observe a trial of female SS guards who allowed 300 Jewish women to burn to death while locked in a church. He is horrified to see that Hanna is one of the accused women.

The film asks questions about morality and identity. One of the law students suggests that everyone in Germany is complicit in these crimes, and not just those in the court, but The Reader doesn’t try to offer any simplistic answers.

With his usual skill and elegance, Ralph Fiennes plays the older Michael. Bruno Ganz (who was Hitler in Downfall) plays a Holocaust survivor who teaches law), while Alexandra Maria Lara (Hitler's secretary in Downfall) gives evidence in court.

Directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare, it’s a hugely powerful story that gains gravitas as it speeds through the decades towards the present.

Iris (2001)

A biopic of Iris Murdoch, a love story and a study of the great writer’s decline into Alzheimer’s, this is a gripping and sad drama.

Adapted from John Bayley’s book about his dying wife, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998), it cleverly flits between young Iris (Kate Winslet) and old Iris (Judi Dench) in order to show you the strength of talent and personality being eroded by the disease. The two eras dovetail perfectly, often connected by visual signifiers (such as the couple swimming “then” and “now”) that make them flow together seamlessly.

Jim Broadbent plays Bayley as a bumbling figure who remains deeply in love with the brilliant, unconventional woman he met in Oxford. My only criticism of the film is that this almost comically awkward characterisation gives little sense that he also had a remarkable intellect of his own.

Winslet and Dench are both highly convincing as the celebrated writer – painfully so in the case of the latter. It’s almost unbearable to watch her “sailing into darkness”, as she puts it, as she slowly but steadily forgets everything she ever knew and even who she is.

I also found it deeply uncomfortable to see the appalling mess in the couple’s home. They were truly living in squalor with no outside support.

Penelope Wilton (of Ever Decreasing Circles fame) is excellent as Iris’s friend Janet Stone.

Carnage (2011)

Set in one evening in a New York apartment, Carnage features two couples rowing over an incident between their children. Directed by Roman Polanski, the real-time scenario works (it’s adapted from a play by Yasmina Reza) and the disintegration of relationships and social niceties is handled with ruthless precision. Not one of the four characters is likeable, so you move beyond feelings of “taking sides” to a realisation that the whole lot of them are self-centred and childish. It’s filmed in such a way that the slightly queasy angles cleverly emphasise their grotesque qualities as the tension escalates. It’s brilliantly twitchy and uncomfortable.

There’s an especially memorable scene in which a hair-dryer is used to dry Jodie Foster’s precious art catalogue after it becomes splattered with Kate Winslet’s vomit. You might think that would be the low point for the characters, but things continue to get worse.

Revolutionary Road (2008)

This faithful adaptation of the 1961 novel by Richard Yates is a fairly bleak study of oppressive suburban conformity in 1950s America, and the perils of trying to dream your way outside of it. The Wheelers are played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who famously played the couple in Titanic. (Kathy Bates is also in both films.) In fact, it almost works as Titanic II, extrapolating how their lives might have evolved had Jack lived, married Rose and settled down to have a family. Suburban malaise is expertly depicted, with a sense of desperation and emptiness always at the edges of their wealthy, comfortable existence. From the outside, they are “special” – the “perfect couple” – but the rigid gender roles and social expectations of their time and place form an invisible prison they both rage against in different ways. Ultimately the unrelenting hopelessness of it all does become a bit overwhelming, even though that hopelessness is extremely well imagined.

Enigma (2001)

Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of a Robert Harris World War II thriller set at Bletchley Park in 1943. Dougray Scott plays Tom Jericho, troubled code-breaking “genius”. Kate Winslet plays Hester Wallace, best friend of Tom’s ex-girlfriend who has gone missing. The pair team up to look for the missing girl and also to crack the code that could prevent Nazi U boats attacking an Allied shipping convoy. It’s an intriguing, mostly low-key story with moments of suspense, but it’s less captivating and emotionally involving than the Alan Turing cryptography-themed biopic The Imitation Game (2014). Kate Windswept is endearing, but Jeremy Northam out-acts everyone else as the sinister Secret Service operative Mr. Wigram. Surprisingly, the film was co-produced by Mick Jagger, who has a brief cameo as an officer sat at a table during a dance. What’s unfortunate is that Alan Turing’s role in inventing the Enigma machine is completely overlooked. In fact, its creation is here attributed to a fictional character – another sad example of the glossing over of Turing’s remarkable achievements.

Titanic (1997)

I enjoyed this far more than I expected to. I have always found disaster stories fascinating, and this one is especially well done. The slow build is effective, setting up the theme of class inequality that is just as relevant now as it was in 1912. The scenes of the ship filling up with water are heartbreaking. James Cameron truly understands how to convey scale and spectacle.

I could have done without the “old lady looking back” aspect, which adds little and could have been cut entirely, but I suppose they wanted to make it a century-spanning epic.

Kate Winslet and Leonardo diCaprio are fantastic as the doomed young lovers.